Last week, we looked at cards that let you recover any character, regardless of their team affiliation. It was a small group consisting of only four cards across three sets. This week, I’m going to look at a markedly larger (but similar) field—team-proprietary recovery cards.

The first thing you’ll notice about this card group is that it’s significantly larger than its non-affiliated sister group. There are almost twice as many team-specific recovery cards than there are non-affiliated ones. Extra recovery is exclusive to just a handful of teams, and that specialization comes with both costs and benefits. To get the most out of a team with access to exclusive recovery abilities, you likely want to be using those abilities. If you’re not, you’re probably wasting one of your team’s advantages.

The teams that have exclusive recovery cards are the Spider-Friends, the League of Assassins, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. All but the last have one unique recovery card, so the fact that the X-Men are gifted with four puts them miles ahead in the recovery department.

The Spider-Friends get Cardiac. This 3-drop can be activated to recover a stunned Spider-Friends character of cost 2 or less that you control. Like the stun-effect characters who always stun one cost level or more below themselves, Cardiac follows a similar pattern. This effect might not seem too earth shattering at first blush—on most teams, such as Brotherhood and Arkham Inmates, there aren’t many 1- or 2-drops that could benefit from it.

The Spider-Friends, however, happen to be loaded with early-game characters that have ongoing effects. Dusk, Black Cat, Master Thief, Aunt May, Jessica Drew ◊ Spider-Woman, and most notably Mary Jane Watson all have beneficial effects for which they must be face-up on the table. Mary Jane Watson has the biggest bull’s eye on her back of all. Any competent opponent will try to keep her stunned whenever possible to prevent her card-advantage engine from running out of control. It’s doable in most cases, but the task becomes doubly hard with Cardiac on the table since he can jumpstart her back into the action instantaneously. At that point, the opponent would have to commit a second attack to whacking MJ again, and that could be difficult if she were protected. Even if it were easy, very few decks could afford to waste two attacks on a 1-drop.

In Constructed, Cardiac will likely function best as MJ’s personal resurrection specialist, but he really shines in Sealed Pack. The stat bonuses provided by some of the other low-cost Spider-Friends are a lot more valuable in Sealed Pack than they are in Constructed, and Cardiac is a cheap, renewable way to keep those bonuses functioning at all times. It’s an overlooked card in Sealed Pack, so you can land a few of them in the right situation. If you get the chance, draft a few copies.

Lazarus Pit is the League of Assassin’s single recovery card, but it’s quite powerful. Lazarus Pit has been praised excessively, so I’ll keep it short—it keeps stunned things stunned instead of KO’d, and in the late game, it allows a massive offensive push that really fits the League’s top-heavy character curve. With all the loyalty that the League’s best characters are stuck with, even just holding stunned characters in stasis to use them to cover the loyalty condition is useful at any point in the game. Lazarus Pit is a staple for League in Constructed, a gem in Sealed Pack, and (unlike most locations) its utility doesn’t diminish in multiples because it isn’t unique. Sweet.

The Fantastic Four gets Lyja, who can be KO’d to recover a stunned Fantastic Four character. Her primary advantage is that she can exhaust to make an attack or pay an activation cost, and then KO herself—her effect doesn’t require activation. Unfortunately, she has two big strikes against her. Thing, Ben Grimm and She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters are both Fantastic Four 3-drops that are so ingrained into the current metagame that not playing at least one seems alien and peculiar.

Lyja works best as a splash in a full-blown Fantastic Four deck, covering missed drops in the late game. Where she really shines, however, is in a stall-heavy build of Common Enemy. She makes an excellent late-game play in such a deck, and can keep your all-important Doom alive and kicking (or Mega-Blasting, as the case may be) in the mid-gam